Geric had a private alcove. Everyone else slept or occupied themselves quietly: the duty guards stoked the fire and one brought pails of water to set to boil. As long as I moved slowly, the room would stay shadowy and still on the periphery of their vision, so long as nothing brought their attention away from the fire.
A last glance at Hlanan, whose face was partially covered, his eyelashes resting on his cheek as he breathed softly. My heart squeezed, and I turned away, five steps—six—and slipped into the kitchen. The back door stood open, the guard having had a pail in each hand so he couldn’t shut the door.
Cold air flowed in as I flowed noiselessly out.
From there, it was easy enough to use the snow prints already made until I got away from the building. Elsewhere in the village people were also up and about, swiftly churning up the new-fallen snow.
I spotted a pair of child-sized mocs drying on a shelf, and nipped them. My bare feet could deal with a certain amount of very cold weather, but I had a long walk ahead of me. I needed shoes.
I hoped the family I stole from would press Geric for payment.
Once I’d reached relative safety downstream, hidden by one of the ubiquitous juniper borders, I sat on a rock to try on my new shoes. They were much too wide and a bit too long, but I pulled the cords tight. I’d have to find some stockings to pad them out and keep them from rubbing.
Or so I thought for the first little ways along the road. I enjoyed the crisp chuff of my feet in the snow, the sparkle of my breath on the air, and the deep blue shadows on the junipers winding away in graceful curves toward a distant river, now a metal-gray gleam. But very soon I remembered the problem inherent in newly-stolen shoes: the sides began rubbing the sides of my feet where the tender skin had chafed raw.
Finally I found myself a sheltered spot under some evergreens and eased the shoes off, then stared in dismay at the pinkish smears on the sides of my feet and my toes. The cold had partially numbed the pain.
I scowled at the shoes, wondering if I ought to try tying them to the bottoms of my feet or just go barefoot and get used to the cold, when I became aware of the muffled thud of multiple footsteps beyond the trees.
I snatched up the shoes and using my free hand and my tail, swept the snow where I’d been sitting, though there was no smoothing it completely. I hoped it obscured the distinctive prints as I took two great leaps and ducked down behind a fallen log.
I need not have bothered.
A rider appeared, leading a remount. I took one look at the low hat, the sweeping cape, and the heavy sword in the saddle sheath and ducked back down, readying myself to spring away as the hooves clopped straight at me.
In one move I popped up, twisted, and sprinted for the woods downslope. The horse leaped the log and cantered two rhythmic strides, easily heading me off.
I turned, sucked in a breath to leap into the nearest tree—something whistled oddly behind me—and I fell flat on my face in the snow, my legs bound painfully by wooden balls connected by supple rope. I tried uselessly to worm free, then rolled over, ready to scratch and bite—and stared up at a cowled face with frizzy blonde hair spilling out.
Captain Oflan Nath of the Gray Wolves grinned down at me. She let out a laugh and vaulted easily from the saddle.
As she approached, I readied my fists. She clapped her gloved hands together in the general gesture of peace, then held her palms up toward me.
I scowled at her, and though I knew she couldn’t hear me, I could not forbear exclaiming, “Let me go! I did nothing to you!”
To my surprise, she tapped two fingers on the other palm, then jerked her head at the horse, who waited in well-trained obedience beyond her, nosing the drifts for anything green that might have survived the snowfall. The remount waited a couple paces away, ears flicking.
I looked from the horses back to her as she squatted down, palms still out toward me, and when I didn’t move she bent to unbind that thing from my legs.
As she straightened up, she looped the thing up expertly and hooked it over her saddle, then regarded me as I stood and brushed snow off my grimy, once-fine silk drape, now unwashed for days. One side of her mouth curled up, and she clapped lightly. I jumped and the horses’ ears flicked as she pointed at me, at the distant mountains, and then spelled out A-L-E-Z-A-N-D on her palm.
In other words, she knew where I was going.
The question was, did she intend to stop me?
“How did you know?” I asked, shook my head, then wrung my hands, wondering how to convey it.
But she gave a soundless laugh, then tapped her lips, clapped her hands together and opened them like a book. I read lips.
I wondered if Geric knew that—and I remembered his impatience, his demanding an interpreter when he needed to convey an order. Though I would happily believe any villainy of him, I didn’t think him stupid enough to talk freely around Oflan Nath as if he thought she was stupid. That meant no one had told him that she could read lips. Even if it would have made communication with “his grace, the duke” easier.
“Did Prince Geric order you to take me there?” I asked, snaking my hand beneath my grimy tunic toward my thief tools, and my bag of liref.
She held up a finger, then signed, Duke’s-orders-to-fetch-you.
“To fetch me,” I repeated, my fingers closing on the bag.
She touched her mouth, then made the duke sign: His-words. Fetch-Hrethan-thief.
She gave me a slow smile. I-obey-orders. You-fetched. Now-we-ride. Alezand.
“Geric wants us to ride to Alezand?” I asked, thoroughly confused.
Her smile widened to a quick grin. No-orders-beyond-fetch. I-ask-not.
An astonishing idea bloomed. “He doesn’t know we’re going to Rajanas? He thinks you are going to pinch me off the road and take me back to him!”
She brought her chin down in a nod. Then she swept her hand toward her horse. Come. I-teach-you-ride.
That was accompanied by an ironic glance at the saddle.
I gazed back warily. This surprise seemed too good to believe.
On the other hand, there I stood, my toes numbing, my belly empty, with a very long walk ahead of me.
All right. I wouldn’t get far riding on my own. In the past I’d only managed to stay on because I could sense the horse’s thoughts, and now I did not dare even use that. So far I’d bounced along like froth on a boiling pot, clutching at the horse’s mane—at least we’d ridden slowly.
I wavered.
Oflan frowned down at my feet and the pink stains in the slush. Then she turned her back, strode to her saddle bag, dug into it, and pitched something at me.
I caught it and looked down at a pair of thick, soft knit socks.
That decided me.
o0o
She pulled me up to sit in front of her.
I wasn’t going to be trusted alone on the second horse until her strong hands had pushed and pulled me into sitting properly. It felt strange at first. She yanked on my shoulders, shoved my hips, and punched insistently at my thigh here, my arm there—but at some point I found myself anchored down, and though I’d always been able to sense how to stay on a horse in a way that was acceptable to the animal, for the very first time I was actually comfortable in the sense that I fit. Further, I could sense through the shift of the horse’s muscles the animal equivalent of, “Ah, that’s more like it, you silly two-legged feather-ball!”
By then Oflan had left the road entirely, following a pattern in the landscape that I could not perceive. The snow began to melt as Big Moon set in the south and the bright sun rose, leaving pools of slush that we navigated around. She chose higher ground strewn with shale until she found a way down to the river’s edge, where we left no prints.
We proceeded at a steady pace as the sun climbed its arc, following the winding river. She stayed away from the occasional villages built along the water. I kept my ears alert, knowing that she couldn’t hear, but it wasn’t long before I discovered that th
e sounds that alerted me matched the sights that alerted her: sudden bursts of birds, the run of a small brown fox, our horses twitching ears and raising noses to sniff the wind.
As we turned with the river and the sun climbed steadily, my awareness underwent another of those shifts in orientation. Now I knew my location: we were cutting across the bottom of the kingdom of Namas Ilan, away from where the river drained into a big lake.
No sooner did I recognize that we had to be nearing the border into Alezand than noises on the bluff above caught my attention. Oflan had already reined the horse under the shade of a tangle of pine trees, through whose thin green-fuzzed branches we caught sight of the flash of sky blue.
Those blue tabard-tunics belonged to Alezand’s Blue Guard! We could hail them—maybe send a message with them!
I turned my head, but Oflan had already kneed the horse into surging up the bank to the bluff. We emerged onto the muddy road as the last of the riders vanished into what appeared to be a small trade town.
Great, I thought, as my empty stomach complained. Maybe we could catch up with them there, and in the course of finding them at a meal, get one of our own.
At the river edge crowded three big houses for wares, and around a square sat about a dozen stores and houses with two inns across from one another, pennants and guild flags belonging to prominent patrons decorating the eaves. A small town, but from the looks of the decorative iron scrollwork, the good slate roofs and the brightly colored shutters at the windows, a prosperous town.
I mentally rehearsed the message to be sent to Rajanas as I peered past winter-bare fruit trees in expectation of seeing the Blue Guard squad reining in at one or other of the inns.
Oflan stiffened behind me, and the horse checked its gait. “Something wrong?” I said to the air as she tapped my arm and pointed past my nearly-healed shoulder.
Part of the squad peeled off down the slope toward the nearest warehouse. The two riders paused, doing something between them—then one whirled something overhead and flung it up high to crash through a window. From inside flames began to flicker and glow.
“Fire!” I squawked.
Oflan, of course, couldn’t hear me. But she’d seen. We began to gallop down the road into town, and arrived as the patrol fanned out in three groups of two.
As villagers streamed toward the fire, yelling for buckets and barrels, Oflan rode straight toward the warriors in blue. The first group had drawn their swords and stepped up either side of the door to an inn when we arrived, the horse sliding, kicking up clots of mud. I clutched its mane, desperate not to be thrown off; when the animal stopped, prancing nervously, sides heaving and head tossing, I saw the reins hanging loose.
Oflan, a sword in one hand, a long knife in the other, charged the blue-clad Alezand Guards.
Not expecting attack from behind, they faltered and whirled. Oflan cut one down with a sword strike to the knee, and broke the forearm of the second.
A bellow from behind caused the two pairs who had spread out to attack to change direction—they were about to get reinforcements. They ran toward us as, from a distance, someone howled, “Fire!”
Oflan glanced over her shoulder at me, her reproachful expression clearly saying, Are you going to sit there or help?
Attack Rajanas’s Guards, who we were riding to warn? They had started the fire, after all. She didn’t wait for me to explain my confusion, but hopped over the fallen two and plunged inside. The doorway now narrowed the field of attack.
I glanced around. I was no good with weapons. Even if I had known much about sword-fighting, my heaviest blow would be a tickle to, for instance, that gray-haired woman leading the four reinforcements. Built like a barrel of solid bone and muscle, she would run me right down. And again, too wide a space and too many people around me prevented me from using liref to put them all into a snooze without knocking myself out as well.
My gaze fell on those balls connected to the rope. I plucked the looped implement from its saddle hook, then frowned. How did Oflan throw them? I was about to put them back when Oflan swept a hand out.
I leaped off the horse and slung the loop over her palm. She shook out the balls as she stepped back out onto the porch. She whirled them expertly over her head until they whistled in the air, then cast them at the leading runner.
He fell with a crash, tripping the second one. Oflan fought the two remaining, her arms a whirl of motion. I ducked back and forth, dithering until I caught sight of the two who had started the fire. They’d gained entrance from the back of the inn, and now they shoved and struck their way through the panicking customers, swords at the ready.
My gaze swept the inn counter. Ah! A bowl of colored game markers. I leaped to the counter, grabbed the bowl, and slung the markers in a bouncing, ticking tide, watching in satisfaction as the first guard’s boot slid out from under him. He crashed to his back as the second one’s feet scrabbled desperately—his arms wheeled—and he, too, slammed down, skidding head-first into the counter directly below me.
As he cursed and groped about for his fallen sword, I noticed the beer keg perched next to me, balanced halfway off the counter so that the spigot was clear. It would only take a push. I sat down and put my feet against it—
“No,” someone howled. “Not the harvest dark!”
An innkeeper thrust past a circle of gawking customers and closed his arms around the keg. Five paces away, Oflan still held the doorway, fighting against the new arrivals. A splintering crash turned heads as Oflan smashed a chair over a man’s back.
The brawny woman shouted, “Retreat!”
“Cover me,” the guard below me said as he scrambled to his feet, swinging his sword in a lethal circle. One of his friends tried to approach, slipped on the still-rolling markers, and shot out the front door face first, cursing loudly.
“Get out of here!” the brawny woman bawled, and followed her own advice, the last two limping behind her.
In the midst of smashed furniture, Oflan straightened slowly, wiping blood from her chin and looking down at one of the fallen guards.
“Alezand!” the innkeeper exclaimed, pointing at the black device on the guard’s blue tabard-tunic.
“Alezand’s Blues, attacking us! We must send a message off to the guild chiefs at once, and protest this outrage,” a skinny old fellow in a worn scribe robe proclaimed in a voice quivering with anger.
Their language—the voices—“They’re not from Alezand,” I said, realizing what Oflan seemed to have noticed at the outset.
“What?” the female innkeeper exclaimed, then snorted. “This looks like Alezand Blue to me.” She dug her toe into the side of the fallen guard, who groaned.
“Right you are, Evit.” And to me, “This is Alezand’s device, plain as plain,” the male innkeeper stated, with another wave of that big hand downward at the blue tunic with the black device.
“But they didn’t speak in Allendi,” I said. “The Alezand people all speak Allendi. Or maybe the imperial tongue.”
Everyone looked at one another, as in the distance we could hear the villagers fighting the warehouse fire. “I didn’t understand ’em,” a man said as he righted a three-legged stool. “Thought it was hot words.”
I shook my head. “Both of them spoke Faran.”
“Nothing good ever comes out of Forfar!”
“Ugh, Farans!”
Everyone looked disgusted. “Faran!” the innkeeper exhaled the word like a curse, and rubbed his grizzled chin. “Everyone knows you can hire them to do anything, long’s you pay enough. Then they’ll turn right around and rob you. Leave you for dead.” He spat to the side, and then after a low-browed thought, spat again on the backside of the moaning guard.
“Why would the Prince of Alezand hire such?” the female innkeeper asked, bending to pick up a fallen chair.
The inn folk stood in a rough semi-circle, so that Oflan could easily see each face. She signed, Not-from-Alezand. Speak Faran.
So she could l
ip read Faran as well as Elras. Seeing non-comprehension from the inn folk, I translated, then added to Oflan, “What do you mean?”
Alezand-make-weapons. Equip-guard. These-here-mercenaries-from-Forfar. False-guise.
She finished with a contemptuous gesture toward the weapons left behind. I spotted a curved sword with a nick in the blade, and thin-bladed noble’s weapon—probably stolen, judging by the aristocratic device worked into the handle—and a cutlass. “You’re right,” I said, and then, “That woman, she’s going to warn whoever sent them.”
No-help. We-ride-Imbradi, referring to Alezand’s capital. Take-him. Another contemptuous gesture toward the supine mercenary.
“You want to take him along?” I asked.
The female innkeeper had been wiping her hands slowly down her apron as she frowned, not quite looking at us. But at that, she lifted her head, and nodded vigorously. “Good idea! You do that.”
“Yes,” the innkeeper said heartily, striding behind the counter. “Take him off with you. We’ll send you with anything you like, in thanks for your timely rescue.”
It was abundantly clear that the sooner they were rid of us, the happier they’d be. I noticed that most of the puzzled looks were coming my way, as if they couldn’t fit Hrethan with this scene. They glanced at Oflan’s distinctive Gray Wolf cowled tunic, then as quickly looked away.
Horses, Oflan signed to me, and I sighed inwardly, accepting my new post as interpreter.
With the full cooperation of the inn folk, we soon arranged for extra horses and received a satisfyingly bulging pack of good things to eat. Oflan and the innkeeper lifted the unconscious guard over the saddle of one horse and tied his wrists and ankles to the stirrups, then we left the village.
Oflan apparently had decided that I could be trusted with my own horse, and I took charge of the food as she led the prisoner-burdened horse and the remounts.
The entire population of the inn—and those villagers not busy stamping out the last of the warehouse fire—watched us until we were safely out of sight.
I waited until I could catch Oflan’s eye, then said, “We’re following the road now? What about Geric?”